Research Interests:

• History of Childhood and Youth
• African American history
• Carceral Studies

Monograph

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North
June 2021, UNC Press

Journal Articles

“‘Hanging Pretty Girls’: The Criminalization of African American Children in Early America”
Journal of the Early Republic (Accepted)

“‘Transfiguring the Soul of Childhood’: Du Bois’s Vision of the Power of Black Children,” Special Issue: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Brownies Book, Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth. (Accepted, Forthcoming Fall 2021)

“In Pursuit of Autonomous Womanhood: Nineteenth Century Black Maternal Mourning and Motherhood in the U.S. North,” Slavery & Abolition, May 2017.

Book Chapters

“Black Girlhood as an Analytical Frame for Doing History,” essay in edited collection Global History of Black Girlhood, ed. LaKisha Simmons and Corinne Field, (Under Contract, University of Illinois Press).

“Bringing Depth to the Movement: Georgia McMurray and the Multi-Dimensionality of Black Women’s Activism,” chapter in edited collection, “It’s Our Movement Now”: Black Women’s Politics and the 1977 National Women’s Conference, ed. Laura L. Lovett and Rachel Jessica Daniel (Under Contract, University of Florida press forthcoming Spring 2021).

“In Pursuit of Autonomous Womanhood: Nineteenth-Century Black Motherhood in the U.S. North,” chapter in edited collection, Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, ed. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton, Emily West, Routledge Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures, Routledge: Sept 2019.

Book Reviews

Review of Robert Churchill’s The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America in the Journal of the Civil War Era.

Review of Aria Halliday’s ed., The Black Girlhood Studies Collection in the Journal of African American History.

Review of Katherine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane ed., Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900 in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, November 2018.

Public Scholarship

“Child Welfare Systems have Long Harmed Children like Ma’Khia Bryant,” The Washington Post. April 2021.

“White Americans Have Weaponized the Idea of Girlhood,” The Washington Post. January 22, 2021.

“Stephen Ricks and Childhood in the Antebellum North” 90 Second Narratives Podcast, December, 2020.

“Black Children Have Always Known State Violence” The Washington Post. June 15, 2020.

“The History of Black Girlhood and the Field of Black Girlhood Studies: At the Forefront of Academic Scholarship.” The American Historian, March 2020.

Contributor, “History of Childhood & Youth Roundtable,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, November 2018